Wednesday, October 22, 2025
1962 John F. Kennedy made a live television address about Soviet missile bases in Cuba and imposed a naval quarantine on Cuba, beginning the Cuban Missile Crisis
1978 Pope John Paul II was inaugurated as Pope
2018 A pipe bomb was sent to George Soros' New York home address, the first Democrat to receive series of pipe bombs in the US
2019 Top US diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, testified that President Donald Trump tied aid to Ukraine to demands that the country open an investigation into the Biden family
2020 Goldman Sachs agreed to pay a record $3 billion to end a probe into its role in the 1MDB corruption scandal to regulators in the US, UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia
In bed at before 10, awake at 3:45 with lots of painful post-WWII thoughts and memories careening around my head, nasty start to the day, aching hips, painful left ankle, up at 4:20 to do a small load of laundry, mainly compression socks and underwear. 44°, wind chill 30°, high of 49°, windy, gusts up to 33 mph.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 7:15 a.m. Kevzara injection at 9 a.m.
Trump Is Said to Demand Justice Dept. Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases is the lead headline in this morning's NY Times.
Trump beats the drums of war for direct action in Venezuela and
White House expands East Wing demolition as critics decry Trump's overreach are the lead headlines of the Washington Post. In Rupert Murdock's Wall Street Journal, none of these stories merits any headline in this morning's online edition. Architectural Digest headline:
Thinking of Leaving the Country? These 9 countries are the best bet right now.In the other world, on Fox and Friends, the lead story is the 22nd day of the government shutdown, attributed solely to the Democrats. The second lead is a crowd of 3,500 that attended a Turning Point USA event at Indiana University that was supposed to be headlined by Charlie Kirk. The graphic shows 30,000 new registrations, 130,000 inquiries for new college and high school chapters. We lefties who get overexcited over the crowds at the No King rallies need to remember what is happening on the other side.
LTMW I see the first bird at the feeders this morning is a chickadee at 7:21. The male cardinal didn't arrive until 7:29. It's Wednesday so the blinds get closed at 7:30 when the lawn crew shows up for one of their last jobs of the season. The turkeys showed up at 10, but the cupboard was bare.
Finishing Cass Sunstein's article on Albert O. Hirschman yesterday, I noticed
Hirschman was sharp and productive into his eighties, but his faculties started to fail him, and by 1997, he had lost the ability to write or read. Ultimately, he withdrew entirely into himself. In Adelman’s words, he was forced “to gaze in silence from a wheelchair” while Sarah “comforted and accompanied an increasingly spectral husband through his decline.”
Hirschman was born in 1915, so it appears he lost his ability to write or read when he was about 82 years old. It's not clear whether Sunstein was referring to Hirschman's serious, studious reading and professional writing, or rather any ability at all to read or write. In either case, it was a sobering reminder reading those words of the sword of Damocles hanging over all us ancients. One wonders when 'he withdrew entirely into himself' and why.
Secure message to NP Kali Kisro yesterday:
Date: October 21, 2025 at 5:10 p.m. CDT
Dear NP Kisro: First, I am wondering how to properly address you and would appreciate your instruction. Second, it has been 25 days since I was hospitalized for cellulitis. I thought I was told when I was admitted that it would take 'a couple of weeks' for the antibiotic treatment to clear the condition ( My memory may well be confused on what I was told, because I was in pretty rough shape that day.) In any event, although the redness in my leg has receded some and decreased significantly in intensity, I am still experiencing sharp pains in my left ankle, not always but regularly, borh sides of the ankle are redder than the surrounding areas, and there is still some discoloration in my leg above the ankle, though as I said, considerably less intense than before. I'm wondering whether the leg and ankle should be looked at by you or another professional, whether further treatment may be necessary, or if this is pretty normal after a bad case of cellulitis. In the ER they told me to come back if there were further problems with the leg, but this doesn't seem like any 'emergency' to me. I would appreciate your advice. Thanks
Maritime murders. From this morning's NY Times, Ecuador Rejects Prosecution of Survivor of U.S. Strike on Vessel, by Charlie Savage:
Mr. Trump’s policy of using the military to kill suspected drug smugglers in vessels in the Caribbean began with a strike on Sept. 2, framed as a campaign against Venezuelan drug cartels. As of Tuesday, the administration had announced seven such strikes that it said had killed 32 people. It has also built up military forces in the Caribbean and authorized covert C.I.A. action in Venezuela.
The legality of the U.S. strikes has been sharply contested. A range of outside legal specialists, including retired senior judge advocate general officers, have maintained that the strikes are illegal because the military cannot deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who are not directly participating in hostilities.
Traditionally, the United States has dealt with suspected maritime smuggling as a law enforcement problem, using the Coast Guard — sometimes assisted by the Navy — to interdict boats. That follows a familiar pattern: Police officers arrest people they suspect of dealing drugs; it would be a crime for an officer to instead summarily kill such a suspect.
However, Mr. Trump and his administration maintain that he has legitimate power to order the military to kill drug smuggling suspects in the ocean because they pose an “imminent threat” and the president has determined that the country is in a formal armed conflict with the cartels, which his team has designated as terrorist groups.
The Trump administration has not provided a detailed legal theory to explain how it bridges the conceptual gap between the criminal activities of drug smuggling and the kind of armed attacks or hostilities associated with self-defense and armed conflict law.
Legal experts question the designation of drug cartels as terrorists, because cartels are motivated by profits and terrorists are motivated by ideology. In any case, the law that allows the executive branch to make such designations permits tactics like freezing a group’s bank accounts, but does not include legal authorization to attack their suspected members with military force.
In discussing the strikes, the administration has pointed to the deaths of about 100,000 Americans each year from drug overdoses. But the surge in such deaths has been caused by fentanyl, which comes almost entirely from Mexico; South America is instead a source of cocaine.
On Monday, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, called for a hearing to examine the policy.
The administration had “failed to demonstrate the legality of these strikes, provide transparency on the process used or even a list of cartels that have been designated as terrorist organizations,” Mr. Smith said. “We have also yet to see any evidence to support the president’s unilateral determinations that these vessels or their activities posed imminent threats to the United States of America that warranted military force rather than law enforcement-led interdiction.”
My email exchange with LOA about this yesterday:
On Tue, Oct 21 at 10:19 AM, Lawrence Anderson wrote to me: Resignations do have to be accepted. I’m sure Krugman’s was approved.You’re right about the Navy LT who’s CO gave him the order to send the Hellfire to hit the boat containing the “narco-terrorists”. What happens to them 4 years from now when we lawyers argue that they should have known better and the Nuremberg defense is worthless. Poor bastards
On Oct 21, 2025, at 10:50 AM, Charles Clausen wrote: But resignations don't take effect immediately, do they? Don't they have to be accepted by the Corps? Otherwise, an officer could say, I quit, and walk away without further ado. I think this 'unlawful order' stuff is, in the main, a trap for the poor bastards who have to decide on the spot whether what they've been told to do is lawful or not. I'm not saying the rule should be otherwise, or else we'd be in an even worse pickle, just that it's a hell of a problem for the individual soldier or Marine receiving an "iffy" order. What I'm wondering about mostly lately are the guys who are blowing boats out of the water in the Caribbean It's hard for me to believe that those orders are lawful. If not, it sure looks like criminal homicide to me.. s/f
On Thursday, October 16, 2025 at 06:44:24 PM CDT, Lawrence Anderson wrote: You’re probably right about the Court, but if I was in that position, don’t think the Court would be on my mind too much. It’s kind of like porn, I’d know it when I saw it. Fortunately, you can usually resign your commission, unlike the EM’s.
On Oct 16, 2025, at 6:01 PM, Charles Clausen wrote: Three cheers for Col. Krugman. I especially liked a small part of his piece, about Trump abandoning our Afghan allies, leaving them to the mercy of the Taliban. He did the same in his first term to the Kurds who fought with our guys against ISIS, betrayed them when his Turkish dictator buddy Erdoฤan asked him to. Re: obeyting unlawful orders, I don't expect very many officers or troops to disobey any order from him as "unlawful," since no one anymore can say with any confidence what is "lawful" or "unlawful,' under this Supreme Court. Nothing's holy or assured anymore. The world's been turned upside down and sideways. s/f
On Thursday, October 16, 2025 at 02:28:12 PM CDT, Lawrence Anderson wrote: Read Col. Doug Krugman’s article in the WaPo today. I can relate. I recall talking to a few fellow Marine officers about what we would do if Nixon ordered us to surround the Supreme Court and force the Court to reverse its ruling ordering Nixon to turn over the White House tapes to the Sam Irving committee. The consensus was that we wouldn’t do it. But we all had about 3-4 years in. If we were 0-4’s or 5’s with about 18 in, might be a different story.
Krugman retired with 24 years of active duty with us. God bless him. S/F
Interesting factoids:
Of the 46 countries in the world with majority Muslim populations, 23 declare Islam to be the state religion in their constitutions. The rest either proclaim the state to be secular or make no pronouncement concerning an official religion. The 23 countries where Islam is declared the state religion are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
Under international standards, a state may declare an official religion, provided that basic rights -- including the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion or belief -- are respected for all without discrimination. This means that the existence of a state religion cannot be a basis for discriminating against or impairing any rights of adherents of other religions or non-believers or their communities. Unfortunately, in practice, many states with official state religions do not meet this test.
Minnows in the bait bucket before climbing out of bed this morning started with thoughts of meeting CBG tomorrow to receive back the copy of my memoir she had borrowed, and thinking that perhaps the portions of it dealing with my childhood following the end of World War II were more fiction than fact. I wrote about it in an attempt to better understand what was happening in my parents' lives when my sister and I were very young, when my parents were also young, unskilled, poor, and beset by my father's PTSD after Iwo Jima. I relived my being afraid of my father, how much he scared, controlled, and subdued or suppressed me, from ages 4, 5, and after my mother was raped by "Jimmy" Hartmann, the month after I turned 6. He reigned over our tiny one-bedroom apartment like an angry, sullen sovereign, demanding "a little peace and quiet" to soothe his troubled soul and not be bothered by these pre-school age children he neither knew nor wanted. I thought of my father telling me late in his life, when he was perhaps 80 and I was visiting him in Florida, that the Marines had not wanted to "let him out" after the war, when he was at his demobilization station, Great Lakes Naval Station. I thought too, that he was discharged as a private E-1, the same rank he held as a "boot" in boot camp when he was drafted. He had served from February 1944 until November 1945, 21 months, including almost a month on Iwo Jima, yet he wasn't even a private first class, E-2, when he was discharged. Why? What happened? Why didn't the Navy docs at Great Lakes want to send him home after the war? The war ended in August, why was he not discharged until November? Or was he actually discharged quickly to get rid of him as a troublemaker? I have supposed that as his next-of-kin, I could request his service records and medical records from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, but I haven't done so, and I wonder why. Do I not want to know his record, especially during and after the battle of Iwo Jima, until he was discharged 8 months later? Would knowing it just provide more painful thoughts and memories of those days and years following the war, and how much everyone in my family suffered from the war long after it was "ended."
